TFGL2021 - S2 - Ep1 - Homer Simpson is a B*tch
Welcome to this episode of the Tech For Good Live podcast.
Fay Schofield is on hosting duties, and she’s joined by TFGL team members Greg Ashton and Tom Passmore
Transcript
Fay: Hello and welcome to a brand new episode and the brand new season of The Tech for Good Live podcast. A lot has happened over the past couple of weeks. We can now meet in groups of six outside. The internet has exploded with memes of the Evergreen ship blocking the sewers and knocking Bernie and his mittens off the top spot of the meme awards for 2021. There isn’t a meme award. There should be. And it’s a four day week this week and next week. What actually could be better. But, instead of us all enjoying the warmest evening, all the year and counting down the days to a four day weekend. God I can’t count, the Tech for Good Live crew is actually here on Zoom, again, to take a look at what's been going on in both the tech for good but mainly the tech for bad world. Joining me today we have Greg Ashton. Greg, what's your favourite easter egg?
Greg: The ones that are made of solid chocolate.
Fay: I've never had.
Greg: They don’t exist because there are bastards.
Fay: [laughs] I thought that was an actual thing.
Greg: And fool you over with like thirty grams of chocolate in this giant egg shape.
Fay: Oh my god.
Tom: I don't think you'd actually like that Greg, if I'm honest.
Greg: [laughs] I don't think you know me that well Tom.
Tom: [laughs] No but I imagine biting into like, because I'm assuming it's going to be about the same size, so slightly bigger than your hands wrapped around each other. Biting into that, that’s going to hurt your teeth.
Greg: No, no, no.
Tom: Okay.
Greg: I can get through that chocolate, no problem.
Tom: Yeah, okay.
Fay: He sharpens his incisors every night.
Tom: [laughs] Just for chocolate.
Fay: Just for chocolate.
Greg: I think if you gnaw on it, like, like a dog chewing a chair leg.
Fay: Great analogy. So, solid chocolate. Dog chewing a chair leg. Tom is also here. Tom, same question. What's your favourite type of Easter egg?
Tom: I actually just like the really cheap, naff ones. There's something really nice about like the cheap naff easter egg chocolate. Put it in the fridge so it's really cold and then when you bite into it, it just shatters. Oh, I love it. That's me.
Fay: There is two types of people though. There's the people that put chocolate in the fridge, and there's the people that don't. And I’m totally put it in the fridge camp.
Tom: I only put it in the fridge with Easter eggs.
Greg: You’re literally not supposed to. It has a median temperature that it's supposed to be kept at. If you go too hot or too cold, the fats separate and that's when you get like the white stuff on the chocolate.
Fay: That’s my favourite bit Greg. That's my favourite bit. [laughs] You're all in for a great podcast this evening. And I'm Faye, I'm your host, and for me, it's got to be the Lindt bunny, because there's nothing makes you feel quite as powerful as like ripping the head of a chocolate bunny or smashing them on the table and I say this as a having once owned a house rabbit, who's now in the big hutch in heaven. Or maybe it's just some throwback from her actually destroying every single piece of furniture that I owned in the house but anyway, there we go. That's your lineup for today. Um, so yeah, Greg, what's going on? Stat of the week.
Greg: There was a lot to choose from. It always happens when we, when we've had a bit of a break, but me and Tom were chatting about this or at least I was firing stuff at him, revelling in his pain. So this is about plastic recycling. A report has been done looking at attitudes and things, and more than three quarters of the UK adults actively recycle their plastic waste, despite not fully understanding what happens to it afterwards. So it's kind of like a good side, bad side. They're doing it. Three quarters are doing it but they haven't got a clue what happens to it afterwards. So this is a report that's been commissioned by Heiko, a company specialising in ring Area Packaging for beer. They also found that only a quarter of the people surveyed are aware of what the term circular economy means. Which means Tom your special podcast on the circular economy has not made it to the masses just yet.
Tom: Not yet, but there's still time Greg, and it's still relevant, so maybe we should push that.
Greg: Even more relevant now. How's it made you feel?
Tom: There's so many layers to this sadness. I mean, first of all, my question is do people actually, so they might be actively engaged in plastic recycling and recycling, but are they doing it correctly. So is it actually just, so in Greater Manchester, you’re only meant to put plastic bottles, trays and tubs in your bin. Whereas here in Glossop, you can put other stuff, but you still can’t put all plastics. So people are like just throwing whatever they want in there, which lowers the contamination, which then ends up in the bin anyway. So people are like, oh yeah I’ve recycled great and then the waste companies are like, no people are rubbish. I don't know. And then also, why don't they know what happens to it? Oh yeah, because there's no transparency in the industry. Smash. That’s it. I'm walking out.
Greg: [laughs]
Tom: [laughs] Mic drop, indeed. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s one of these stories where it’s like the numbers being said, I actually don't know what they mean.
Greg: Yeah, It's weird. I do feel like more people are more, there was the original pushback about the whole breakup of delivery days and things like that and I have an absolute nightmare with the bins near my house. Because shockingly, when you have old Victorian houses and old streets that then all get split into multiple flats, and you give everybody a bin, it means you've got a shitstorm on bin day of like multiple bins and stuff getting thrown everywhere. You don't know whether people are flytipping or whether it's just arseholes from down the street.
Fay: Let’s hope none of them listen to this podcast [laughs].
Greg: Anyway, I’ll tell them to their face they’re an asshole.
Fay: [laughs]
Greg: But yeah, so you've gone through all this process of building up that kind of interest in recycling and getting people to split stuff out, which seems to be working and I think, you know, I've looked at stuff before and people were less keen on doing it. When now it's like, what happens next. And I do wonder, I keep seeing this coming up more and more. You know there was another, there was a video done by John Oliver over in America, which was raising questions about the plastic industry. So I do wonder now people have started doing it if they're actually, you know, the last thing you want to do is convince people to do something, and then reveal to them that it is a waste of time.
Tom: Yeah, which, which might be the case. Because there was that programme with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall where, like people were recycling but then it was going over to the far off shores and just being basically stockpiled. So it was being recycled because it was going into recycle bins. We were sending it and bulking it up and then sending it somewhere else and it's just like, people buy out and like, it will take a generation to then buy back into the system. And we can just make it better, make it better. We can live that dream.
Fay: It’s mad though. Like something I found out this week is that sellotape isn’t recyclable. You can't recycle sellotape and that just blew my mind, because I'm like, I'm probably it. Forgive me, Tom. Don't give evils, I know nobody can see what you look like because it's a podcast but like, I must admit I'm kind of one of those people that are like, I'm recycling, look at me putting all the stuff in the recycling bin. I will go away and listen to the Circular Economy podcast and refresh my memory. But yeah, my mind was blown off. It’s like oh my God, you can’t recycle sellotape.
Tom: And there’s loads of things you can't recycle. Well because just like thousands of different types of plastic and like what does it get broken down into and then if they get all mushed together, then you reduce the quality of the plastic. Plastics are a hard thing to recycle. Like, it would be at the best of times but because we've got, I'm going to throw out a random number, 23,568 different types of plastic, it's just like, it's almost impossible to recycle at all. So some of if does have to get left by the wayside. So yeah.
Greg: And by design, a lot of it, you know, the reason plastic is so favourable is because it is durable.
Tom: Yeah.
Greg: And it doesn't break down. They wanted it like that. So that's why it was created.
Tom: It is a wonder material. It's just, it's like fire. Let it get out of control and now we just need to, like, temper it. We need to manage it a bit better.
Greg: That’s a great analogy, actually. Imagine if you could just visualise what the world would look like if plastic was fire.
Tom: Didn’t they try to do that last year with like, the California fires?
Fay: I was there. I was there and honestly I've never seen as much fire in my entire life. Good God. So if we're kind of using that analogy for plastics, that’s a shitload of plastic.
Tom: Probably more plastic than there was fire [laughs]
Fay: Probably more plastic than there was fire. What’s like, come on Tom, who is like disposable expert number one. What's like one, you know, if people are listening, like me, not that I might listen to this podcast again who knows. I'm on it. Maybe I will. But like, what's one quick, what's one thing that everyone can do to like better educate themselves about plastic or, yeah, what's your quick tip for recycling, for the people at home who are enjoying sitting in the garden this evening, enjoying the rule of six. What’s one quick tip that they can do?
Tom :It's really boring, what the best tip is read your local authorities information,about what you can put in your bins. I mean because generally the local authorities put it out there and people tend to not read it. But generally their documentation is really good. And they know their service so honestly, just go out there, see what the local authority, the council or whatever you want to call it, has offered, and then follow the rules. I know it’s really boring. Follow the rules, follow the guidance but read the rulebook.
Fay: Follow the recycling rules. I love it. There you go. That's a hashtag in itself. I'll use that later.
Greg: I think people should be doing is, like complaining. Right. You know complain organisations that aren't reducing their plastic use. Complain at your MP. Complain to anybody. There is a lot of, you know organisations that are trying to reduce plastic use in their packaging and things like that but it's really pushing people to do more. And also we're switching to creating things only using recycled plastics, because actually the problem then is the supply of that. So, we're not recycling enough of the plastic that's been created to make, create a product out of recycled stuff, a viable solution. So we need to get the input side first before that becomes a viable solution to the recycling issue.
Tom: Like it's a proper wicked problem actually. So there’s this amazing stat from, we call him Professor Plastic, who's based in Manchester University.
Greg: [laughs]
Tom: So, he gives us this chart that he shows us and he’s like, which is more environmentally friendly. A single use polystyrene cup, or a china cup. What are they called? A cup cup. A normal cup cup.
Greg: Yeah.
Tom: And you know, everyone's like it’s the cup of coffee and it's just like no. The polystyrene coffee is, based on pure energy efficiency, 99 times better. You’d have to wash the cup hundreds, if not thousands of times more to get that energy efficiency out of it because washing cups uses energy. All of this, moving them around the planet, then they break but if you've got that polystyrene cup, used it once, put it into the right proper place. So, the question is like, what you're trying to solve here? Are you trying to solve a waste problem, which is basically people just putting stuff in the wrong place or are you're trying to solve an energy problem? And both of them are killing us. So, oh great, positive.
Fay: Wow. That actually, this whole idea of plastics and waste, killing us, which sounds super, is an excellent segue into today's Charity news of the week. Greg, what's been going on?
Greg: So you mentioned memes at the start, and this has produced some pretty hilarious memes. So I don't know if anybody's seen Seapiracy on Netflix.
Tom: No. What’s Seapiracy sorry?
Greg: So, Seapiracy is the new Netflix craze documentary. Maybe not just yet as popular as Tiger King, but it's getting there. The meme I'm referring to is lots of people asking why they hadn’t called it conspiracy, because
Fay: Oh my God. Yes. So just, just for background, people might not know, this is the whole big thing. It’s really pissed me off this week. So the first like documentary that went out from the people that made this one was called Cowspiracy, which was all about shining the light on the meat industry and meat is bad and all that kind of stuff. And then obviously this one is like Seapiracy and it's like, obviously about fish and shit. But it's like why don’t you call it conspiracy. It’s the best name ever.
Tom: Yeah. They dropped the ball on that one.
Fay: Massively.
Greg: So, for those that haven't seen it, it’s a new documentary, I won't go into details, in like too many details in case you want to see it.
Tom: I haven’t seen it and I want to watch it.
Greg: The reason I included it is because it was a nice segue from the previous article because it starts off talking about plastic in the oceans and a lot of it touches on plastic in the oceans. But it kind of covers a lot of bases as well. The documentary maker is a big fan of the ocean and ocean life so he was interested in plastic because of the effect it was having on ocean life. He then goes into focusing more on the fishing industry and talks about labelling of products and have claimed that they're sustainable fishing. And it's in the charity news sector because he calls out a number of charitable organisations, for various reasons, around their kind of support and involvement with the fishing industry and what he views as being a very false and fake labelling. So saying it's sustainable when actually he feels like there's no evidence to say it's sustainable. And I just found it all really fucking frustrating.
Fays: [laughs]
Greg: Yeah, certainly is an issue there. I cannot get away from, you know, like industrialised fishing is a big issue. Much the same as industrialised farming is a huge issue. Well, there's certain bits where it just infuriated me. So we'll get on to the charity stuff in a minute. But firstly, I mean there's a section where he's like, oh, is this about sustainable fishing. And there's a bit where talks about whaling. And then he goes to like the Faroe Islands, the Faroe Islands, and he's looking at this Icelandic traditional whaling section, and this claims to be like sustainable because it's done in the old ways and it's just for the local community. At no point does he actually answer is it sustainable. He just spends five minutes with like some murder porn, just showing loads of blood in the water, which is really upsetting. And I prefer it if those whales were alive, but if that's like a centuries old community thing, fuck off back home you entitled white saviour. Like it really pisses me off. It would be like him going to communities that still, you know like, use reindeer but they use like every element of that reindeer and it's only for the community. It's not like mass marketed and farmed. It is not his right to go in and tell those communities that they should or shouldn't be doing those things. So that just really pissed me off. And then he gets on to the charity stuff and it is that classic thing of, well, it's easy for him it's like, it's just throwing stones when he's literally not involved in any way. It is dead easy for him as a documentary filmmaker to go in and go, this is wrong, shock horror. As we've just identified when we're talking about the plastic industry, the world is really fucking complex.
Tom: Yeah.
Greg: So just going, his solution is everybody stops eating fish. The industry should just closed down and we should stop doing that. The world doesn't work like that. So like complaining about charities not calling for the end to fishing completely, is just completely short sighted, and it's very easy for him to say. But when you're an organisation that's trying to make a difference, you have to make some sacrifices. You do. It’s the reality of charity work. You can't solve every problem. So, you target the ones that you can resolve, and you deal with that.
Tom: Yeah, like so I haven't, I haven't seen it and I'm really interested about seeing it. But it is that interesting thing of like, everything should be perfect and we should stop doing it. But it’s like, well, what are we going to eat? Like, what are these people going, like what are their jobs? What's the economy of these areas? Nothing is simple. Nothing's easy, it's all complex. It's led. It’s nuanced. It's been built up over centuries, and it's hard to pick apart and you can't just wade on in there and go, yeah magic wand time. Like again, I haven't seen Conspiracy, but I'm sure at the end of Cowspiracy or whatever he was just like, yeah, close down the meat industry, close down the milk industry. So it's close down the meat industry and dairy industry and then the fish industry. What's next? We can't grow soy here in the UK. So we starve. Great, brilliant. I don't know.
Greg: Yeah, it results in like larger than we've ever seen deforestation in order to plant soy and other crops, and then suddenly we're like, oh wait, but we've, you know, we've completely destroyed the soil and the ecosystem in this area because we've put in a monoculture in order to fuel this hunger for vegetarianism and it's like, it's all about balance. The orangutans are dying and then we've got people saying, oh you should, we should eat soy. Llike maybe we should just, like, you know what, I've got a solution.
Fay: Go on then Tom.
Tom: It’s just people.
Fay: Eat people?
Tom: Eat people, well you know. I'm not gonna say that. No we should not be eating people. But, you know, I just, we need to eat, and like, yes, we can't do it all. We're imperfect animals living in an imperfect world, and, like, everything needs to be in moderation. We can't just have a simple solution that works for everyone around the world, because the UK is very different to Somalia or Colombia. We have different fauna and flora. We need to eat different things. The problem is just actually industrialization of monofood. Like just, here is your beef. Here is your fish. Because it's not like every type of fish. It's probably just a cod. Eat all the cod, eat all the hake, no not hake, that other fish. Haddock?
Greg: Halibut?
Tom: Halibut.
Greg: All of these are fish.
Tom: All of these are fish but some of them are just massively going to fish to the enth degree whereas actually, it's moderation right? We need to protect them, moderate, and yeah. What do I know? I'm sat in a little office in the north of England miles away from the seats. I don't think I get a say on this one.
Fay: Planning cannibalism apparently.
Tom: Never, never planning.
Fay: [laughs]
Tom: Never once planned on cannibalism. That’s slander.
Fay: Well, let's move on. Let's move on. Greg, what’s charities saying about this? Let's skip over Tom being a cannibal conversation [laughs]
Greg: So, Oceana responded. It’s the only response I could find. The other organisations may have responded. He kind of went through and called out a number of them. But yeah so Oceana responded saying, I haven't got the whole response as it’s fairly lengthy but I thought the key kind of thing was to set the record straight. What Oceana campaigns for and focuses on is increasing ocean abundance through policy victories that put in place science based fisheries management in national waters where most of the world's fish are caught. We believe people have the right to choose what they eat and we applaud those who make personal choices to improve the health of our planet. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I used to work at Lush years ago.
Fay: We smelt nice like constantly didn't you?
Greg: Oh I stunk for years afterwards. I’d be sitting on the bus and the ladies would be like, I can smell that Lush.
Fay: [laughs]
Greg: And I remember people coming in, and just like Lush were miles ahead of any other organisation. We're going back years here. So there were yards and miles ahead, yards and miles, miles and miles ahead of any other organisation trying to do something ethical. But you’d still get those people coming in, going, have you got sodium lauryl sulphate in this. And sodium lauryl sulphate, at the time there was no alternative and it's a foaming agent, and I can't remember where they get it from but they had issue with it because it was something to do with animals or something like that. But if you try and sell a soap that doesn't foam, people don’t buy it. In our heads, it's ingrained that if it doesn’t foam, it's not working. There are places that do them now without foaming agents and things. I think it is a little bit more normalised but it's that choice between do we do what we can to be more ethical or do we do everything and the only people that will buy it, are the ones that like….
Tom: Know already.
Greg: Leaves from the garden. It's like you can't go to the enth degree. Like you can't die on your principles because you will die on your principles. You've got to have a balance if you want to have an impact and it is a nasty situation to be in, but you've got to do it.
Tom: Marginal gains. Marginal gains. Lots of little marginal gains.
Fay: As Tesco says, every little helps. I don’t flog Tesco. I'm not sponsored by Tesco. Never mind. I don't have a pivot for this, so I'm not going to do one. Tech news of the week.
Tom: Talking about cannibals, tech news of the week.
Fay: Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. And then Tom, you can let us know which famous person you'd eat.
Tom: [laughs]
Greg: Yeah which famous person?
Fay: There you go, screw your favourite easter egg. Which famous person would you eat?
Tom: No one. I'm not condoning in any way violence towards somebody that has found themselves in a celebrity situation. No. No. No.
Greg: It would have to be like somebody who's very calm. Like with Wagyu beef they say it’s really good because they look after the meat and it has a really nice life and they sing to it and massage it. Apparently it’s all nonsense but yeah I feel like that would be really nice.
Fay: [laughs] This podcast should maybe go out on Halloween, never mind Eid. Let’s skip over quickly. What's happening, Greg?
Greg: So, Facebook, details of similar documentation around managing posts, has has been leaked to the Guardian. This was a few weeks ago now. Obviously we had our little break, but I just thought it was really, really important to discuss particularly because of some things that have happened in the media recently, such as the Meghan Markle interview and all that kind of stuff. But basically as part of this guidance, Facebook says, if somebody is a public figure, you can call for their death.
Fay: Woah.
Tom: That’s bleak.
Fay: How, like, why?
Greg: So they say, because we want to allow discussion, which often includes critical commentary of people who are featured in the news.
Tom: And wanting them to die is perfectly acceptable.
Greg: Yeah, yeah. So, and this can be, so this is a public figure. So if you've got a certain level of following or if you've featured in even local news, and I think there's like very specific rules around you have to have had at least two headlines within a certain time period, then you are classed as a local celebrity. So people can call for your death. What they’re not allowed to do though is kind of direct it at you. They can’t tag you in it.
Tom: They can just suggest to a friend that you die. They can just like get on a soapbox somewhere on the digital jill, and go, Tom Passmore should die. They're not allowed to say at Tom Passmore, you should die. That's naughty, but they can say, Tom Passmore should die.
Greg: Yeah.
Fay: That's mad.
Tom: What a world. What a world.
Fay: I must admit, the thing that I love about this article, the only thing about this article is the quote from Imran Ahmed, founder of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate who described the revelations as flabbergasting, which is a great word.
Greg: [laughs]
Fay: Yeah, I am flabbergasted. What the fuck! Excuse my language followers but like what the fuck? It’s just madness. I’ve worked in social media for a very very very long time and you just get to the point where you're like, they can't become any worse than they already are. Like, it's just not achievable, and then you read shit like this and it's like, oh no, hang on a minute, we’re just gonna dial up the evil shit just one more notch, it's fine. Like, what. Oh, God.
Greg: I was just scrolling down on the article and I found one bit that’s hilarious. So, the thing that caught my eye was Homer Simpson is a bitch. Right. So users can bully dead people but only if they died before the year 1900. And they are allowed to bully fictional characters, for instance, Homer Simpson is a bitch. It’s just like, like it's this funny thing of like this, someone is having to write it down because before it was impossible to like kind of log and track everything people were saying. Because it used to be people saying things out in the streets but now it’s people saying it on Twitter. And it's just like, actually, people are horrible to each other. They may be like joking or friendly or whatever. It’s bants. But so much bants is actually if you just break it down, those core words actually can be quite offensive, but it's alright because you know each other. And then you have to make them pull it out, like you should be able to call that person up bitch because you know, whatever, but then it's just like, then you've got other things going on as well about what is the correct swear words to use in that situation and what's like kind of negative and positive for different reasons and eerrghh. Would not like to be in that world. That's what I'm saying.
Fay: No, but we have to call, if, if this episode is not called Homer Simpson is a bitch, I'm refusing to do any further tech for good Live episodes. This episode must be called Homer Simpson is a bitch. The running title was Tom Passmore is a cannibal but let's maybe not do that because then there'd be a headline about you Tom and you’ll become a public figure. I'm getting that excited I'm knocking my mic over thus making it full circle. So yeah, episode title must be Homer Simpson is a bitch. Right, what's next, what's next, Greg because there's, there's two like good stories here.
Greg: Well, I just want to say, although they are horrendous monsters, I don't think this necessarily is completely from them. So, I don't know if you've seen the Britney Spears documentary recently.
Fay: Yes.
Tom: I’m so behind on my TV watching.
Fay: Oh God Tom.
Greg: [laughs]
Tom: I have a full time job.
Greg: I’m surprised. I wouldn't have expected you to be necessarily interested in a Britney Spears documentary unless you're hiding a love of Britney Spears.
Tom: No.
Greg: Fair enough. It was also the anniversary of Caroline Flack and we had a podcast around that time last year and we had some journalists on the podcast and in that episode we were talking about mental health and a duty of care that was becoming increasingly apparent for the media industry. It just didn't seem to be present at all and the language and the approach that was being used by the press, just a no point considered the mental health of anybody involved. And then watching that Britney Spears documentary and then seeing the headlines around Meghan Markle’s interview recently, I just thought it just continues. And I just think Facebook is kind of continuing this media, although they would never claim to be a media outlet, but I think they're just continuing this kind of media outlet attitude, which is why you're in the public eye so you’re fair game. And I just don't know if that's true, because not at any point has anybody considered the lasting impact on those people's mental health, their physical health, and we've seen, with Facebook especially, we've seen what can happen if people get riled up on social media platforms that leads to people being murdered are injured and other things. So, yeah, although they need to sort it out, I think there's a wider consideration, around how we treat celebrities and that consideration for the media where we need to start factoring mental health into it.
Fay: 100% agree. Facebook is just an additional fuel to that awful shit fire. Shit fire. There we go. There are so many analogies in this podcast.
Greg: Not even the dumpster fire.
Fay: Dumpster fire
Greg: Maybe you can shit in there as well [laughs] And in the recycling.
Fay: Exactly [laughs] Shitting all over the recycling.
Tom: Yeah.
Fay:I don't know where I'm going with that. I'm never gonna be allowed to like host a podcast again. It's just going off the rails this one. Never mind. But Homer Simpson is still a bit of a bitch. Anyway, what have we got next? Are we on to Rant all night of the week.
Greg: Yes. Yeah, let's move on because Tom has some good news I think.
Fay: Hooray.
Tom: It's great news. So, you may or may not know that I'm quite interested in the world of waste. I also really like data and I also like open data and open source stuff. And actually a couple of weeks ago I was part of a hackathon, a three day hackathon, with Code The City up in Aberdeen and did that for two days. Four or five of us made a waste map of all of the household waste recycling centres in the UK so you can find it on www.openwastemap.uk. So the data is hosted on Wikidata, and on OpenStreetMaps. We've created a bit of a front end so people can find more information out on it and we have created an open data standard called Open Free R or Opener, we haven’t decided yet, to basically go right this information is in the wild now. Let's see what people can do with it. So I've got loads and loads of things I want to do with it. I'd like to somehow get Alexa so you can be like, hey Alexa, where can I take my mattress, and that information, Alexa would give you that information. Same with Siri. Does Cortana still exist? Is that a thing?
Greg: Oh yeah, yeah. If you’ve got a Windows computer.
Tom: Is it Big Speak that other one? So the thing I love about this is like we built, we built kind of all the tooling to allow you to do this, not all of it, but, and then went, there's only four of us, we've only been doing it for like eight hours, well sixteen hours, and then the community got behind it and they just started populating this map. So we gave them the rules on how to do it and they’ve just been doing it and it's just been really nice to watch because people want to have more information and we're trying to just make a nice easy place for people to use. And then ended up talking to local authorities about it as well to see how they can help so the data is even richerand more accurate. So yeah, no, it's just brilliant. Honestly this is what I love about open data. So you can get on GitHub and you can help us out, make the website better or you can get on Open Street Map and make that better. Yeah, it just warms the cockles of my heart.
Fay: [laughs] We're all gonna need that after listening back to this podcast.
Greg: [laughs] Like a nice, warm steak.
Tom: Like a nice [laughs]
Fay: Like a nice warm. Oh god. Do you mean a stake or cow’s steak?
Greg: Human stake.
Fay: [laughs]
Greg: Why wasn't this done before Tom because this seems like something fairly simple right? I mean not that, not like, it’s gonna be like, really easy.
Tom: Yeah, no, no, and honestly all it is is it’s a bit time-consuming. There’s nothing hard. I mean, you go onto a local authority website and you find their opening times, find out where it is, you put information on OpenStreetMap like the barrier for entry is very low. It’s just local authorities are scared because if you release open data then anyone can change it, and then how will they have control over that data, then insanity will reign supreme. And it's just like, well local authority’s data is normally twelve months out of date [laughs] So it can’t be any worse than that. And generally all people will do is like I made a payment. What I’ll do is, change it, like, well that's the perfect world. Yeah, so this just this fear but now open data is much more kind of normalised in the world, and especially now that, so Bing does a lot of. Remember that search engine, Bing. They use OpenStreetMap a lot to get their data, so we’re having a chat with them as well to see if Bing can use our data and then go international.
Greg: Cool.
Tom: And it's all just like go, let's, let's do it. Let's do it. So the more points that we get on here, the more information we get, the more likely Bing will get involved. And then Google will get involved and then actually help people.
Greg: Yeah, I just love that, you know, four day hackathon and a lot of criticisms get made of hackathons about like, whether it actually results in anything but, you know, Bing knocking at your door.
Tom: Yeah, I mean we knocked on their door first and then they just opened it.
Fay: Don’t tell them that Tom. Oh no, they came knocking to you.
Tom: But like yeah, there’s lots of the community saying like, can we add this on there as well. So at the moment it's just like those big man centres that you have, but people want kind of smaller local recycling points in, like a Tesco or Sainsbury's or whatever and like, again like cool, yeah, we can do that, not with four people but let's do it. Let's get the community behind this. Like, it makes me warm inside and warm and fuzzy.
Fay: What’s our and finally Greg ?
Greg: So I didn't get this. I didn't find this. It was Sian, my fiance, who found this, and was like, Oh, you'll quite like this story. And I was like yeah, I do you really like this story. So there's a British startup called Koal Creatives, spelt with a K. I’ll let them off for that one.
And they are redesigning the beauty industry. So they're creating beauty items for people with disabilities. So in particular, creating kind of like makeup brushes that are instead of being round, they've got flat edges so they don't roll and they're easier to hold. They include braille along the handle. It even goes down to things like the way that the brush is constructed so that if somebody has a motor disability when they're applying makeup, if they're doing it in jarring motions, it reduces the effects of what that would look like with a normal makeup brush, so that they can much more easily apply a layer of makeup and for it to look good. I saw somewhere as well, I was trying to find it,I'm sure they've got like a QR code or something on there so that you can scan it and get audio feedback as well.
Tom: Oh wow.
Greg: I just love it that they've really gone into the fine detail about how can we construct something that just seems like an everyday item for so many other people and make it accessible and also really fucking cool and stylish. Like they're not like, they don't look like NHSmake up brushes. They look like something that, you know, you'd see on Instagram and people want to own.
Fay: That’s amazing, especially when you think about like, you know, not getting into this now but like the beauty industry at large and especially kind of how toxic that can be sometimes. And encouraging people to look a certain way and act certain way and this kind of stuff so actually taking, as you say like a pretty much everyday product, and making it so that it is more accessible to, you know, different, you know, different types of people but not making it look like, yeah, as you said, NHS make up brushes, is lovely. That’s it actually. We've come to the end of our deep low and medium height journey [laughs] Listeners, what do you think? We'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm saying that but I don't really think I want to hear people's thoughts about this specific podcast. Maybe just send it in the mail, the mail’s slow at the moment. Send us a letter rather than a tweet. Anyway, we would love to hear your thoughts. Please do get in touch on Twitter at tech for good live or you can email us if you prefer, at hello@techforgood.live. Sorry I always get our email address wrong. We would love it if you gave us a nice iTunes review and told your mates about the podcast. Who knows, you might have a friend who's interested in cannibalism.
Tom: Or waste. Let’s focus on waste.
Fay: [laughs] I’m joking. Or actually you may have a friend who wants to get involved with Tom's open map, which can be found at openwastemap.com, I believe. We will of course put a link to this when we tweet about it. But anyway, thank you to our producers, the Tech for Good Live team and Podcast.co for hosting us.